


empty spaces (filled with you and me)

by renecdote



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Angst, Danny also needs a hug, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It, Happy Ending, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Season/Series 10, Steve Needs a Hug, worrying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:21:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23696107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renecdote/pseuds/renecdote
Summary: Five times Danny wakes up and Steve isn’t there.(Plus one time he shouldn’t be but he is.)
Relationships: Steve McGarrett & Danny "Danno" Williams, Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 26
Kudos: 256





	empty spaces (filled with you and me)

**Author's Note:**

> So uh. This is something? The idea started as relationship fluff and then grew into angst instead whoops. Blame the finale, it muscled its way into this fic and turned it into a monster.
> 
> Set throughout the second half of ten, but no specific episode spoilers except for 10.07 and 10.22.

**1**

It’s a full moon and the room is bright. It takes Danny a moment to remember why the shadows playing across the ceiling look wrong. This isn’t his bedroom. Not the ceiling above his couch either, or the ceiling above Steve’s couch which he is also more than familiar with. This ceiling is too white, the light coming in through a window that is too close. 

Hotel, he remembers in the foggy seconds after coming awake. D.C.Steve.

After his initial protest, Steve hadn’t actually put up a fight when Danny crawled into the bed beside him, so it’s only a matter of rolling over and—

And finding the sheets empty?

Danny sits up, the last traces of tiredness washed away by the concern-fuelled adrenaline flooding his body. 

“Steve?” he calls, even though he knows, can see already, that there is no one except him in the room. Muttering a litany of curses, he flicks on the bedside light and squints against the sudden glare to find pants and a jacket. He doesn’t bother changing out of his sleep shirt, just zips the jacket over it and shoves his feet into his shoes without socks.

Steve’s phone is gone from the bedside table, so Danny dials his number as he heads down the hall and jabs the button for the elevator. At nearly four in the morning, the lights are dim and he’s the only one wandering around the hotel hallways. The elevator doors slide open before Steve answers and Danny is just about to hang up with another curse when the call gets picked up, half a second before it would have gone to voicemail. 

“ _Yeah?”_

“Where the fuck are you?” Danny snaps. He’d been planning to be calm and reasonable, handle Steve with all the care he needs right now, but as soon as he hears the unconcerned note in Steve’s voice—like he hadn’t disappeared in the middle of the night and scared the crap out of Danny—all that flies out the window. Danny is concerned, yes, but now he finds that he is also mad. 

Steve, the asshole, continues to sound unconcerned. “ _I’m on my way back,_ ” he says. “ _I was going to stop for coffee, do you want—”_

The elevator spits Danny out into the lobby and he strides toward the glass doors that lead onto the street as he hisses, “No I do not want fucking coffee. It is four in the goddamn morning, Steven, what I want is to know where the hell you are and why you thought it was a good idea to—”

He breaks off then because he still has no idea what exactly Steve thought it was a good idea to do. 

Steve pauses and Danny can hear the beep of a car horn in the background. When he realises he can also hear the echo of the sound outside the call, maybe only a block or two further up the street he’s standing on, he relaxes a bit. Steve can’t be too far. 

“ _I didn’t mean to worry you,”_ Steve says, softer, careful like he’s picking and choosing the right words. “ _I just went for a walk. You were tired, I didn’t want to wake you.”_

Danny takes a deep breath. He leans against the wall outside the hotel, feeling almost dizzy with the relief catching up to him. Steve isn’t in danger. He never was in danger. He just woke up from a nightmare or couldn’t sleep at all so he went for a walk. In the middle of the night like a crazy person, but still. 

With the concern ebbing, Danny finds it difficult to hold onto being mad as well. “You couldn’t have left a note?” he grumbles.

“ _Sorry,”_ Steve says. He sounds like he really means it too, which is something.

Danny looks up the street again. He can see the luminous green of a Starbucks sign and, although the relief has washed away most of the adrenaline, he still feels too keyed up to go back up to the room and sleep. 

“How far away are you?” he asks. “I’ll meet you for that coffee, I’m already out of bed anyway.”

Steve gets to the Starbucks only a minute after him and, as much as Danny would like to lecture him about giving his friends heart attacks by vanishing in the middle of the night, seeing the dark smudges under Steve’s eyes, the dark colour of the sling against his chest, the rough growth of his beard—seeing how tired and lost and _broken_ he looks—it’s impossible to do anything but hug him. It takes a moment, but when Steve ducks his head and hugs back, the last dregs of worry and adrenaline in Danny’s chest drain away. 

**2**

There is a note, hastily scribbled on a receipt and left by the coffee machine for Danny to find. _Gone swimming_ it says, followed by a strange scribble that might be an S or might just have been Steve trying to get the pen to work before he wrote his note. Danny rolls his eyes, scrunches the receipt up and tosses it in the trash. 

“You know, I could have just looked outside and seen that you were swimming,” he says when Steve steps through the door ten minutes later, the towel around his shoulders useless to stop the dripping he’s doing all over the floor.

Steve tilts his head and a drop of water slides form his hairline down to his cheek. “Last time you woke up and I wasn’t there, I specifically remember you telling me I should have left a note.”

“That’s because it was the middle of the night.” It comes out sharp. Danny finds that he is still kind of pissed about that. 

It doesn’t help that his first night on Steve’s couch wasn’t exactly restful. His knee aches and his back aches and if the caffeine in his coffee doesn’t start working its magic soon, his head is going to be aching too. Maybe Steve senses this because he doesn’t needle at the topic anymore. He just crosses to the fridge and pulls out the butter, then the milk, then a carton of eggs.

“You want?” he asks, holding up the eggs in offering. It’s not an apology because it’s Steve and, well, they already sort of did that in D.C., but it’s something.

“Sure,” Danny says, making himself comfortable leaning against the counter.He watches Steve crack eggs and put bread in the toaster and when the quiet has settled between them he points out, “You know, most people would get dressed before making their guests breakfast. You’re going to get seawater in my eggs.”

“You’re lucky you’re even getting eggs with an attitude like that,” Steve retorts, the bickering easy, familiar. It seems to spread over the cracks that have been spreading like spiderwebs through Steve’s armour ever since his mom died, settling into them like the putty builders use to fill up holes that are big enough to be noticeable but not quite big enough to pull the whole house down with them. It’s not a long-term solution, Danny knows, but for now… 

“And don’t think you’re getting in my car before you shower, I will not be letting you drive if you’re just going to drip— ”

“ _Letting_ me drive?”

“Yes, Steven. Let. Because it is _my_ car.”

Steve’s face becomes animated with the argument, but it’s a good kind of animated. A relaxed kind. After nine and a half years, Danny knows that it is when Steve gets still and silent that he really needs to worry. So he doesn’t. Not today. Maybe later, maybe if those cracks get any bigger, but for this morning he just lets himself feel like everything is going to be okay. 

**3**

Danny’s phone wakes him and he reaches out without opening his eyes to find it on the coffee table. It’s Duke, telling him they’ve got a body up on the North Shore that is right in Five-0’s wheelhouse. _Five-0’s wheelhouse_ can never mean anything good, so Danny lets himself groan into his pillow before he makes himself get up. 

He almost has a heart attack when he opens his eyes and finds Junior watching him over a cup of coffee, leaning casually in the kitchen doorway like watching Danny sleep isn’t Steve McGarrett levels of creepy. Or maybe he knows how McGarrett it is and that’s why he does it. You never know with the kid.

“Was that about a case?” Junior asks before Danny can formulate any of these thoughts into grumbling words. He sounds much too bright eyed and bushy tailed for—a quick glance at his phone—six o’clock in the morning. Jesus.

“How long have you been there?” Danny asks. Then he shakes his head, rubbing at his face. “No, actually, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know. Yes, that was about a case. There’s a body on the North Shore with our name on it, apparently—you can call the others and tell them to meet us there.” He stands up, stretching as he looks around, realising there is one person missing from the burst of early morning activity in the house. “Where’s Steve?”

“He’s already gone.”

Danny blinks. “Gone,” he repeats. “Gone where? Swimming? Running?”

Junior shrugs. “The office, I think. He took Eddie.”

He took—

Right. 

Right, okay. It’s six o’clock in the morning and Junior thinks the most important thing about Steve having gone in to work so early is that he took the dog.   


Or, maybe not, Danny revises, years of detective work picking up the slightly too tight grip Junior has on his mug, the frown lurking around his eyes. This disgustingly early hour isn’t exactly normal for Junior either, so he probably woke up when Steve crept out of the house. Danny can’t believe he didn’t wake up himself. 

“Okay,” he says. He snatches up clothes at random. “I will swing by the office and pick up Steve. You stop and get coffee on your way to the scene. Extra strong coffee.”

A grin flickers across Junior’s lips. “Yes sir.”

Danny lets the honorific go this morning, too busy thinking about the case and Steve and—okay, mostly about Steve. He knows Steve hasn’t been sleeping. He doesn’t know whether it’s nightmares or insomnia or what, but if this waking up before dawn and sneaking out without telling anyone where he’s going becomes a habit, they’re gong to have to talk about it. Sooner rather than later. 

“It’s too early for this kind of worry,” Danny mutters to himself as he heads into the bathroom. His reflection looks tired in the mirror and it’s partly Duke’s fault for calling so early, but mostly it’s Steve’s fault. Ever since D.C., ever since they came home and Danny moved in, the concern in his chest that he’d been trying to soothe has only grown thorns and sunk its roots in deeper. It had been okay for a while, but now Danny is losing track of what okay ever was.

He sighs, watching his reflection sigh with him. Sooner, he tells himself, we’re definitely going to have that conversation sooner.

He turns the shower on hot and makes himself push thoughts of Steve out of his mind. They have a case. He has to focus on that today. After it gets solved… Then. Then he can figure out what to do about Steve.

**4**

He’s not sure what wakes him. It’s not Steve getting out of bed because that must have happened long enough ago that the sheets on the other side of the mattress are only slightly warm now. It wasn’t strange and horrible dreams. It wasn’t anything in particular, it seems, but as soon as Danny wakes up and finds that he’s alone in bed, he can’t just go back to sleep.

Still only half awake, he gets up and follows the sound of muted words down the stairs and into the dining room. Steve is sitting at the table, mug of tea by his elbow, phone pressed against one ear. 

_Case?_ Danny mouths, wondering if he should give up on the possibility of going back to bed and make a pot of coffee. 

Steve shakes his head. “I can get on a plane in the morning if you want me to,” he says into the phone and Danny freezes. The stalactite suddenly growing in his chest quickly melts though when Steve continues, “No, Mare, don’t worry about that. No, I— If you need me, I’ll be there.”

Mary. It’s not a navy buddy or Chin or Kono or Harry or anyone else who could be calling in the middle of the night to pull Steve into danger. It’s Mary. 

Danny goes through to the kitchen and starts making coffee, but for entirely different reasons now. He knows better than to think that Steve will be going back to bed even if Mary does talk him out of getting on the first available flight to LA. 

When he returns with two cups of coffee, the call has ended and Steve is just sitting there staring into space instead of rushing upstairs to pack a bag, so Danny figures Mary must have been successful.

“Everything alright?” he asks.

Steve takes the coffee with an absent smile. “Yeah, Mary was just freaking out about Joanie spiking a temperature. She figured I wouldn’t care about being woken up in the middle of the night.”

“You don’t care,” Danny points out, nudging Steve’s foot under the table. 

Steve shrugs. It’s a guilty kind of shrug, which means he probably hadn’t been sleeping anyway. They’ve already had that conversation though and Danny isn’t in the mood to rehash it right now, so he lets it go, lets the silence settle comfortably between them instead.

“You going to go running?” he asks when he catches Steve looking toward the window for the third time. It’s still an hour from sunrise, but that hasn’t stopped Steve in the past.

Steve shakes his head though, taps his fingers against his half-empty mug.

Danny takes another sip of this own coffee, considering all the things that could be bothering Steve before he takes a stab at reassurance. “You know, I’m sure Mary and Joan are fine. Worrying is a normal part of having a kid, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t know what to do.”

“It’s not that,” Steve says, but he’s frowning down at his coffee now. “It’s just…”

“Just what?” Danny prompts.

Steve sighs. He looks toward the window again, even though he can’t possibly see anything except the reflection of the room lit up in the glass. “Five years ago, if Mary was worried about something like this, she would have called Deb.”

Oh. 

“Oh babe.” 

Danny abandons his coffee and his chair and pulls Steve into a hug, the angle a little awkward until Steve turns into it, presses his face against Danny’s chest and brings his hands up to fist in the back of his shirt. Danny isn’t sure what to say, isn’t sure that anything he could say would even help. Steve is trembling slightly, but he’s not crying, not even making a sound while Danny runs his hands through his hair and squeezes as tight as he dares. Even when his back starts to protest the slight stoop he’s found himself in, he doesn’t move until Steve pulls back, rubbing at his face to hide the way he ducks his head in embarrassment. 

“Feel better?” Danny asks. 

Steve shrugs. He stands up, spine popping as he twists and stretches. “I’m going swimming,” he says abruptly. 

Danny looks toward the window and finds the night outside a little bit lighter. Still. “It’s not even five-thirty.”

“So go back to bed,” Steve tosses over his shoulder, already moving through the house while Danny trails after him like a water skier being pulled along by a boat. He could let go at any time, but he doesn’t. 

“You could not be so freakishly athletic for one day and come back to bed with me,” he says, but it’s half-hearted. 

Steve just grabs a pair of boardshorts off the drying rack in the garage and strips to get changed right there. “Or you could join me.”

“Yeah, sure, I bet you’d love to watch me torture myself,” Danny grumbles. He snags a towel—bright pink, probably left behind by Tani the last time they had a team barbecue—and tosses it at Steve’s head. “Don’t drown.”

Steve grins, sudden and mostly real. “You’d miss me too much if I did,” he says. Then he’s whistling for Eddie and jogging down to the beach before Danny can snipe back that he shouldn’t even joke about that. With a sigh, he looks longingly toward the stairs and the bed waiting at the stop of them, then goes to make another pot of coffee and start the day. 

**5**

In the first few seconds, he forgets. He wakes up and Steve isn’t there and it’s fine, it’s just like any other morning, he’s just gone for a morning run, maybe a swim. It’s fine.

And then it’s not fine. Steve isn’t running or swimming, or maybe he is, but Danny doesn’t know because Steve isn’t here. Steve is out there somewhere on the other side of the world, searching for himself or whatever the hell it is he’s doing.

Danny pulls the pillow over his face. It still smells like Steve, which is—of course it does, it’s Steve’s pillow, Steve’s sheets, Steve’s bed. He’s only been gone a day and Danny hasn’t done laundry between then and now so of course the bed still smells like him. He just never expected that to feel so painful. More painful, even, than the bullet wound in his chest. 

The tears come easily, quickly, and even though it hurts, Danny keeps the pillow over his face to muffle them. Steve is gone but Junior is still just down the hall, Tani with him because the day had been so emotionally draining that they hadn’t even cared to be embarrassed about spending the night together in their boss’s house. It’s not like they were doing anything except sleeping, which Danny knows because the house had been silent when he went to sleep and it’s silent now and—fuck, he’s going to have to get used to this silence, isn’t he?

Except, it’s not silent, not really, because there is the quiet clicking of claws on wood and then Eddie is whining at the bedroom door. It’s only when the sound comes again that Danny makes himself get up, shuffle to the door and pull it open. Eddie jumps up onto the bed immediately, sits there with his eyes wide and glinting in the early morning half-light until Danny sinks back down beside him.

“You miss him too, huh boy?” he murmurs, scratching behind the Lab’s ears.Eddie snuffles and presses his wet nose against Danny’s neck, leaning forward with all his weight until Danny has no choice but to lie down or shove the dog away. 

He lies down. 

The bed still smells like Steve and the pillow is still damp from Danny’s tears, but with Eddie curled up beside him, head warm and heavy against his arm, maybe, just maybe, it’s a little bit easier to lie there and breathe.

**+1**

Sunlight is only just peeking over the horizon when Danny stumbles out of the bedroom with one guiding thought: coffee, he needs coffee. 

He only gets halfway down the stairs before he stops short. 

He thinks he’s hallucinating at first because this can’t be real. Steve is—wherever the hell he is this week, somewhere that isn’t Hawaii, isn’t _here_. So there is no way that the person sprawled over the couch, long legs hanging off the edge, shirt riding up to reveal a new tattoo on his ribs, stupid hair cut stupidly short again—there is no way that person can be Steve McGarrett.

“What the fuck,” Danny says, maybe a bit too loudly.

The body on the couch tenses, a sudden stillness that belies the appearance of sleep. He’s probably been awake since the moment Danny sighed up at the bedroom ceiling and gave up on the possibility of a few more hours of sleep. Assuming he was ever asleep in the first place and not just lying here in wait. 

“You bastard,” Danny says. Then, because he thinks it bears repeating, “What the fuck.”

There is a stumbling sound upstairs, like Junior has just fallen out of bed or tripped on his way into a pair of pants. 

“I didn’t want to wake you,” Steve says. His eyes are open, fixed on Danny, but the rest of him hasn’t moved an inch. 

Danny kind of wants to hit him and kind of wants to kiss him and he’s still frozen halfway down the stairs, not sure which impulse is going to win out. 

“Sir?” Junior says from the landing above him. Then, with a subtle Steve-addressing emphasis that anyone else might not notice but Danny has become attuned to after three years, “Sir.”

Steve’s smile is a little hesitant. “Hey, Junior.”

For some reason it is that that snaps Danny out of his stupor. He descends the rest of the stairs and when he’s finally standing in front of Steve—after six fucking months, Jesus—there really is no question about what he’s going to do. 

“Stand up,” he says impatiently. He makes an _up up_ motion with his hand and when that doesn’t get Steve moving fast enough, he just grabs an arm and pulls. Then finally, _finally_ he can get his arms around Steve and hug him. It only takes a second for Steve to get with the program and then Danny is being squeezed so tightly it would hurt if Steve wasn’t being so damned careful about it at the same time. 

Distantly, he is aware of Junior’s footsteps disappearing back toward his bedroom, but mostly Danny’s focus is on squeezing his eyes shut so he doesn’t start crying against Steve’s shoulder. 

“I hate you,” he mumbles, hands fisting in the back of Steve’s shirt. “God, I hate you so much.”

Steve snorts, but it sounds more choked than amused. “Love you too, Danno,” he whispers, as though his voice will shatter if he speaks any louder. 

Danny sniffs and he’s not crying—he’s not—but maybe Steve is, a little bit, because there is a feeling suspiciously like dampness in Danny’s hair that definitely wasn’t there a minute ago. 

“Never do that again,” he says fiercely, not entirely sure if he means the leaving or the sneaking back in during the night or just. All of it. 

Steve doesn’t say anything, but he does pull back far enough that Danny can turn his head and kiss him and Steve kisses back and—yeah, okay, it’s not a promise, but for now it feels like something close enough. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading :) Kudos and comments are always appreciated--I'd love to know what you guys thought. 
> 
> You can also find me on tumblr [here](https://renecdote.tumblr.com/) if you want.


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